Electracy As Art (Email 5//Campany 2)

Hi everyone,

For my last email, I'd like to think about the whole semester... as a whole CATTt (let's say), instead of just amputated parts like a puzzle. I want to instead focus on the propensity of this class, to think about it as a work of art in its own right. To do this, I want to focus on everything that made it what it was, our paint and canvas, our Shi, our weapons fired from afar and from close up. Four books, a room with computers inside a room with computers, .... and that small whistling noise that happened often during the end our sessions (was it a bird?). Also, did you notice the camera mounted on the wall, that we are constantly being photographed/filmed for three hours a week (and obviously more, but I'm talking about specifically in the context of this class)?

For a painting to be painted, or for a picture to be taken, the artist needs several things to work in her favor. The light has to be just right, and for that to happen, the dark has to be just right too. When we're creating our system of poetics, we're obviously choosing our materials very carefully. The path that we choose to take, whichever that will be, will lead us to different ideas, different experimental outcomes. This is where our process looks like possible time lines, branching off into a multitude of different directions: do we choose the yellow paint or the green? It will change the picture.

If we think about this process as photographic, or filmic, I think it allows for us to realize even more things about Electracy particularly, since the translation from photography to Electracy (is translation needed?) is smoother. The process is like a photograph when we choose a single shot to represent the event of the Heuritics of Electracy. In this sense, our blogs are pictures. Each blog is one picture, like the mystory where we ended up with a resulting wide image (not wide imageS). These days, although people obviously did this before as well, photo manipulation is also quite easily done. As we saw in my band presentation when Anastasia showed us the inverted images that totally transformed the picture into something Other than either of the two kinds of photographs that Thierry de Duve talks about, this manipulation is unique to the computer age, early computer age. In fact, early film experimented with this style often - an image would suddenly become its inverted self. This shift in the film form is jarring of course, because dark things become light and light things become dark. The contrasts are startling: the once-real becomes a total hoax, a fiction. But a fiction that tells us something. 

If we aim to think about the world in an Apophatic way, then inversions are necessary. Inversions too, help one see where something is missing in their painting. Here is an experiment: Color something in, with an actual paintbrush, on MS Paint, and then invert the image. You will have probably missed a spot. I think that's one of the things that Electracy does: it allows us to see the missed spots. And the best way to exemplify this is through art. It's hard to think about "missing spots" in photography, but inverting photography allows us to find parts of the picture that we otherwise missed.

These missing pieces and inversions make me think of ink blots, and of Lacan. One of Lacan's arguments in his text is that analysis, the process of the analyst and the analysand, the painting, the coloring in sessions, reveal things in an inverted fashion: The analysand might not only understand himself, but he might retroactively understand his psycho-analyst better too. In Electracy, we see this kind of thing all the time with the idea of the gaze. The gaze is always (perhaps) an inversion. In our poetics, it is essential, I think, to focus on this concept of the gaze, because we are the gazers here: We are walking through the city and picking out windows to stare into, to see ourselves from and through, to make ourselves transparent and empty, to soak in a kind of opaqueness. To change our focus (we have the ability to do that with our eyes and with our ears - remember the mysterious whistling noise in our classroom, how can we think about that in electrical terms, how can we use it).

I have gone on too long, I fear, so I will end with the idea that our seminar can be seen as a work of art, perhaps a dance rather than a painting or a photograph. Something thought out and choreographed with space for constant spontaneity. Are we all then taking pictures, screen caps, of the event? Do we function in the same way that the Instigram video we watched last week function, together capturing the apparent whole of the semester (in the notes we take)? What about the camera that's constantly filming...? Does it matter? 

Peace,

Asmaa 

------------------------------------------------------------------Response

A thoughtful reflection on process and time...  You identify a feature of Electracy that we have not discussed in any detail, which is that its fundamental outcome and purpose is "well-being."  The complexity  of this purpose is evident in the historical lesson that every apparatus seeks "well-being" in its own way (through salvation, or through empirical truth, for orality and literacy respectively).  But now Electracy turns upon this dimension itself, not to address it indirectly, but to consider how or in what way a body thrives.  Commentators on Aristotle will tell you that when the Greeks discussed well-being they did not promise happiness (that may be an accident of translation) but "thriving," measured more in terms of surface or worldly excellence rather than a state of mind or an intimate satisfaction. 

  Holistically, what does Electracy require?  You gave us one  good example that may be generalized.  The temporality of electracy (as readers of Avatar Emergency know) is Moment Against Now (to invoke a forumla). The formula gestures towards the heterotopia already discussed-- against Cartesian Cogito, the fact that I am not where I think, and think where I am not, meaning that my being is dispersed and the best we can do to gather it is an assemblage without unity let alone good form.  The new dimension opened to ontology is that of "nonsense," so to speak, of the sort Joyce penned in Finnegans Wake, of the sort explored in the non-figurative, abstract art experiments of the vanguard.  It concerns just the dimension of style, ornament, decoration, formerly marginalized and now foregrounded as the dimension of manner, style, concerning just intensity or quality of experience.  The promise of the apparatus is that this  sort of quality may be captured, enhanced, extended, shared (the Hadron Collider of jouissance).

   We noted that another scene of apprenticeship of Electracy besides Training Analysis in Psychoanalysis, is Auteurism is film.  How may an auteur be detected? not so much in story or even discourse, but style (here is the  import of Russian Formalism and its immense influence on textualism).  The other temporalities of orality and literacy persist (cyles and lines).  The temporality specific to electracy, beyond "history" (needing to reoccupy the abandoned bunkers of historiography to find new answers), is Moment (click).  What does that mean in practice, as comportment in the world? (how should I behave).  That there is an ethics following from an aesthetics of our meetings Wednesdays at 4:05, Spring semester 2014.  Well-Being is here now there then.